From the Magazine

A Life in Focus: Remembering Antony Armstrong-Jones, the First Earl of Snowdon

The royal family and a crowd of notables gathered in London to pay tribute to Lord Snowdon, the former husband of Princess Margaret. Dafydd Jones captures the send-off for the renowned photographer and much-loved rebel, while Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter recalls his dashing, deeply human approach to life.

Should you ever get the chance to live the life of an artist—and it’s
something I highly recommend—you’d be hard-pressed to conjure up
anything more episodic and picaresque than the life of Antony
Armstrong-Jones, the man who became Snowdon. A tinkerer, a diarist, a rake, a prince, an earl, a crusader—he was all of this. Did I mention the matinee-idol looks and the devilish wit? Where Tony found the time
to become not only the world’s most photographed photographer but also
one of its most prolific is anyone’s guess. But he did, and the body of
work he produced in his lifetime is a monument to both his talent and
his endurance.

Tony had a sly, mischievous grin that suggested he must have been a
handful as a boy (or indeed as a husband). His parents divorced when he
was young, and he divided his time between a castle in Ireland, where
his mother took up with an earl, and a house in London, where his father
worked as a barrister. A third housing option was Old House, in West
Sussex, where his grandparents lived. The cottage had no modern heating,
lighting, or plumbing. But it did have a studio. Before he had a chance
to really use it, he contracted polio and was shipped off to an
infirmary in Liverpool. Tony was never destined to be your typical
16-year-old polio victim. At one point during his stay, Noël Coward and
Bea Lillie popped around for a visit at the urging of his uncle, the
stage and costume designer Oliver Messel.

From Popperfoto/Getty Images.

It can be safely said that Tony’s career as a photographer began at
Eton, where he swapped a microscope for a cheap camera and turned a few
empty biscuit tins into developing trays. He continued taking pictures
at Cambridge and later set up shop in gray, postwar London, where he
took home almost £3 a week lugging equipment and doing routine dogsbody
chores for a society photographer. In time, as photographic interns
generally do, Tony was taking pictures himself, of debutantes and other
minor social eminences for Tatler, Picture Post, and The Sketch. He
graduated to photographing theater productions and then to the outer
fringes of the royal family. In 1957, he was commissioned to shoot the
newly crowned Queen; her husband, Prince Philip; and their two children,
Prince Charles and Princess Anne. As with his theater work, he attempted
a more journalistic approach on this assignment, in contrast to the more
formal poses favored by the chief photographer of the court, Cecil
Beaton. The results were something of a sensation. The photo of the
young Queen and Prince Philip standing on a stone bridge over a stream
was, writes Tony’s biographer Anne de Courcy, “reminiscent of
late-eighteenth-century romanticism.” A year later, he swanned into the
New York offices of Condé Nast, where he spent a month shooting pictures
for Vogue at the behest of Alexander Liberman, the grand design shaman
for all of the company’s titles. It was a plush, career-making
assignment, and the dashing Antony Armstrong-Jones now had a career that
measured up to his personal life.

Which was becoming something of a public sensation. Tony had met
Princess Margaret, then on the rebound from her breakup with Peter
Townsend, at a dinner party at the home of the Dowager Duchess of
Devonshire. The princess paid regular visits to his tiny studio in
Pimlico and things just sort of jelled. Their wedding, at Westminster
Abbey in 1960, was televised around the world. And following a honeymoon
on the royal yacht Britannia, Princess Margaret and her husband, the
soon-to-be-appointed Earl of Snowdon, moved into an apartment in Kensington Palace. According to de Courcy, Beaton was thrilled by the
marriage. “May I thank you, Ma’am?” he said to the princess, “for
removing my most dangerous rival.” To which she replied, “What makes
you think Tony is going to give up work?”

I loved collaborating with him, and in 1995 I commissioned Tony to shoot
a portfolio of unprecedented scope, of the great wave of British theater and film actors. It would be the first time almost an entire issue of
Vanity Fair had been handed over to a single photographer. Despite the
fact that Tony was 65 when he accepted the assignment, he threw himself
into it, running my colleague Aimée Bell, who handled much of the
scheduling (and who was less than half his age), off her feet. Over the
next two and a half months, he took 85 different portraits, mostly
singles, but some group shots. Leafing through the issue now, one sees
the faces of a remarkable and vast gallery of English theatrical talent,
much of it still in bloom, but with many, such as Sir Alec Guinness and
Sir John Gielgud, no longer around.

The thing about Tony was that, in addition to shooting the swells of the
last half-century, he also strove to capture—and therefore
champion—the disadvantaged, the dispossessed, and the infirm. There
was a photo he took of a two-year-old urchin for a feature for the
Sunday Times magazine years ago, headed “Some of Our Children,” that
still stands as an iconic portrait of the English underclass. He shot
the mentally ill, portraying them, as de Courcy writes, “with dignity
and pathos.” He produced documentaries and portfolios of the disabled
and the homeless. He once said, “The hardest thing to photograph is
dirt and loneliness is harder still.” Marjorie Wallace, a journalist
who worked with him almost 50 years ago, recalled, “Only those who have
been with him as he photographs deaf, blind, physically or mentally
damaged people can know the depths of his compassion and the
extraordinary lengths to which he will go to capture the invisible
struggle behind the ragged face of an old woman, or the tired smile of a
refugee.”

Loneliness certainly crept into his marriage to Margaret. At one point,
there was no more glamorous couple in Swinging London—he, the dashing
photographer in the Aston Martin convertible, and she, the gorgeous
princess. Even after his marriage to Princess Margaret dissolved, he
remained on good footing with the royal family, and he shot the official portrait of the Queen for her 80th birthday.

There are many things to admire about Snowdon, chief among them his
deprecating attitude toward his work. He took his subjects seriously, but not his art. “Photography is a craft,” he told Newsweek, “and a
matter of using your eyes. It’s quicker and easier than painting. You’re
a mechanic using a machine. . . . A lot of taking photographs is
simply moving furniture.” Indeed, he said, “Most people of my
generation took photographs because they drew badly.” On another
occasion, Tony explained, “I try to photograph with love and sympathy.
I hope one gets a reaction of love between two people. That’s very
important.” He said that it had been Messel who taught him how to look.
“I used to stay with him in Venice, and we would walk all night. Most
people look down. He taught me to look up. You miss so much by not
looking up.”

Indeed, Tony continued to look up, to gaze at the stars and see the
light right until his final days, this past January. One of my favorite
Snowdon portraits is of Laurence Olivier, as Archie Rice in the film The
Entertainer. “He was wonderful,” Tony said. “You see, it’s always the
great people who arrive on time and seemingly have all the time in the
world.”